Een bezoeker van onze Academy avond van 6 juli stuurde een gedicht in, als wijze van reflectie. We delen ‘m graag:

Hope is not shallow optimism,
Nor is it the perpetual positivity of your Instagram feed,
Positivity and optimism cannot carry your fear,
your grief, your dispair, your doubt, or your anger.
They crumble in the face of it.
They have nothing to say to it, besides cheap platitudes
and so they leave you stranded in the middle
of the mess of your pain.

Hope can carry our Lament;
it can grieve a deep loss.
It can be disappointed at the world it sees around us
It can express the fear that life will never be the same again
And it can say “it was not supposed to be this way”.
Hope can carry that disappointment. Hope carries our fears, our despair, our anger, our pain, our grief.
Hope carries all that and so much more,
but it does not lose Hope,
and yet neither does it deny reality.

Hope carries us and our hard work
we do for a better world we may never see.
It carries our acts of kindness for our neighbours,
and it carries our prayers for our enemies.
It carries every good deed we do,
and every mistake we make.
Hope carries us through life
It carries us to brighter days ahead.

Hope can carry all that and so much more
because it believes that wherever this life ends,
that end is not the end.
That this life and this world is not only in our hands.
That there is a future where all things will be made new.
Not just for me and mine,
but for the world we were meant to bless.

In the face of that Hope,
we can carry our losses and we can carry our crosses.
We are living in a very real world,
with very real fear and very real grief. We do no always do the right thing, we break things, we lose things and there are things to fear. 
Yes, our hope extends beyond this life,
but we are here now. And we still feel all the feels, good and bad, in THIS life.
Expressing those does not deminish our Hope,
rather, it acknowledges that in the end
we are only human….